About the talk: While we read blogs, tag content and swap lifehacks, people in rural areas are still learning to type. Public libraries are making many more technological choices just to provide basic information and Internet resources nowadays, yet the paradigm for learning to work well with technology differs dramatically from learning to work well with books. Jessamyn West will be talking about being a tech-savvy librarian in a profession struggling into the 21st Century.
More about Jessamyn West: Jessamyn West is wrapping up her job as an outreach librarian at a rural public library in Vermont. She has worked in public, special and college libraries and done stints of on-the-fly reference at Burning Man, the WTO and the Democratic National Convention. She has maintained librarian.net, a weblog for radical librarians and other interested parties, since 1999. She is fascinated by the intersection of technology, the public sphere and politics.

Most digital libraries are about digitalized artifacts. Books, images, music, film. Some are about born digital artifacts. Mailing lists, digital documents, annimations, etc.
Monica McCormick notices that the California Digital Library’sCounting California project goes back to what computers used to do — munch and crunch and rearrange numbers. Counting California gives you access to all kinds of databases and spreadsheets that you can download and work with using a variety of applications.

From several time zones away and from a different season, Andie Miller points us back in time to the year 1999 in which an article was published distantly north from her home in South Africa about the politics of time in the Guardian (UK).
Among the many delights detailed:

[T]hough GMT was declared the universal time measurement in 1884, the French, until 1978, continued in law to call GMT “Paris Mean Time retarded by nine minutes and twenty one seconds”.

Much there about the colonializing use of time as the fabled 2000 was approaching as the article was being published.